How To Play Quake (Again) On Your Raspberry Pi

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A month ago, the folks at Raspberry Pi announced that they now had access, thanks to Broadcomm, to an open driver for the BCM21553 cellphone processor chip. This meant that DIYers now had complete access to the board and would be able to access the onboard Raspberry BCM2835 chip (a similar chip to the BCM21553) with an open source driver – as long as someone ported it over from the BCM21553.

Anyhoo, a programmer named Simon Hall took up the challenge and for his efforts was able to win the $10,000 bounty and port Quake III over to the Raspberry Pi, thereby allowing you to waste some nasty aliens on a machine approximately the size of an Atari 2600 joystick. The process is pretty slow (“Compiling will take around 12 hours, so it is helpful to overclock the Pi for this task,” writes Eben Upton, without a trace of irony) but it’s amazing that you can literally download, compile, and install open source graphics drivers onto the Pi and play a shooter in the time it used to take to download Doom from the warez boards over dial-up.

You can read the how to here and start bursting alien heads with your sweet BFG.